Monday, August 2, 2010

Meet Wilson. He's a jackass: a scornful, judgmental man without much capacity for self-reflection. And though he is hilarious, he is certainly not likable. That is, until life presents him with opportunities to delve deeper. Clowes continues to display his knack for tearing down walls of normalcy to reveal the raw emotional truths beneath.

One woman's account of how she tried to change her life for the better, this book is also a compendium of spiritual, scientific, psychological, and experiential research on the universal pursuit of happiness. It remains light, honest, and refreshingly accessible throughout. Informative without being dense or overbearingly authoritative, this was a great plane read.

"We stayed there, joined at the hair, joined at the knuckles...I think he felt it too—some unspoken sense that if we stayed very still, if we blurred into each other, it mightn't be real. " This excerpt is from the prologue of this stunning tale of self-learning and the meaning of family in the dying context of the Irish Traveller society of the late 1950's.

An unexpected friendship with a vintage clothing client leads Phoebe into a journey of healing as she comes to terms with losing her best friend. This is a gorgeous story of grief loss and new beginnings, the tangled dynamics of family, the horrors of losing a dear friend, and the potency of helping a new one. Light enough for summer reading, powerful enough to last you all year.